Reading Response # 1: Week 2

My first response to Dyer’s analysis of the star system was in wondering why he chose to focus on stars 30 years or more removed from the active stars of contemporary Hollywood. It seemed to me that an analysis of the stardom would only benefit from the being able to draw on the readers’ experience of those celebrities during their height. I wondered if there was a reason for the specification of the era but as it turns out “Stars” was first published in 1979 and Dyer, apparently, had not updated it since. However, the question of the experience of stardom in the past 30 years kept resurfacing as I continued to read Dyer’s analysis of the “sociological” and “industrial” concerns that have developed the star phenomenon in Western culture. Dyer explores the various theories of the star in relation to reception, representation, and creation and posses the star as a uniquely industrial phenomenon. He traces the origin of the star as far back as vaudeville describing their creation as a vehicle for serving the economics of the “industrial” in the capitalistic market and their “sociological” consumption and representation as formed by their culturally specific desires (citing Morin and Merton’s terms of “needs” and “dreams” to describe how the persona of a star becomes popular, defining of a moment in time, and representative of the developing ideology). Still, I can not help but wonder about that 30 year void and how the Hollywood has seen since the arrival of the Blockbuster and the influence the “Information Age” has impacted industrial and social production and consumption of stars. Dyer briefly touches on the shift to sound in cinema and the affect of that change on the perception of the star from a godlike figure serving as an ‘ideal’ to a ‘typical’ figure that no longer commands the same infallibility but responds in a manner considered average to human behavior. However, I question whether this remains a fair assessment of stardom; mostly, that the line is so clearly distinguished. For there are those stars for whom their persona is that of the “ideal” such as Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey while at the same time there are those whose personal (off screen) behavior can clash with their on screen roles, such as Lindsey Lohan, creating a vastly more complex picture of the audience-star relationship and also the star-film relationship, especially in light of the accessibility of information and ‘tabloidization’ of modern stars. This is not to say that the model of stardom Dyer puts forward is straightforward and simple but, perhaps, there has been another transition through which the expectation and roles of stars has again changed. It also, in my opinion, begs the question of whether there is a difference between stardom and celebrity (where the former denotes a certain amount of respectability and the latter maybe leaving room for infamy) and whether Dyer is accounting for such a separation in his book.

- Olivia Everett